Thousands Of Yahoo! Fantasy Users Were Shut Out Of Their Drafts On Sunday

Some drafts are so bad, you wish the site you were drafting on would just explode, assigning random players to random teams and undoing the surefire last-place squad you’d selected. Some drafts…

However, most of the time, fantasy football owners feel pretty good about their choices (afterall, even the best teams end up being 1/3 waiver wire acquisitions). That’s why it’s no surprise that Twitter went berserk over the last few days as Yahoo! frantically tried to figure out why teams were disappearing, players were showing up on the wrong rosters, and some users were disconnected/prevented from drafting entirely Sunday night.

Grrrrrrrrrrrr…

[Reddit] What really pisses me off is how inconvenient it now is for me as commissioner to find another common time for drafting between 12 busy ass people. Fuck you Yahoo, you should have fantasy figured out after 20 years and the millions of dollars of revenue it brings you.

Yahoo! — a web property that has virtually no purpose other than fantasy league hosting and news — did their best to resolve the problem(s), posting a billion apologies and updates as heads rolled and sprinklers rained down inside their Sunnyvale offices (we assume). Maybe a string quartet played as the ship sank, who knows.

Background: On Sunday, August 24th, some of our users experienced issues while conducting their Fantasy Football drafts. While our engineers worked to get things back up and running in time for new drafts today, we are continuing to work hard to bring a few lingering issues to full resolution. Instructions and updates below are meant for the small number of users who were impacted while setting up their drafts yesterday.

For all other Fantasy players, you can conduct your drafts as normal.

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UPDATE August 25, 2014, 9:39PM PT: A quick update about mock drafts. Mock Drafts are once again available!

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UPDATE August 25, 2014, 3:56PM PT: A quick update about draft grades for leagues we fixed that had mismatched draft results and team pages. We will be re-running the Draft Report Cards, and you’ll be graded on your correct team.

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UPDATE August 25, 2014, 9:45AM PT: Our engineers worked through last night to get things back up and running in time for drafts today. In addition, for any teams that had the wrong players rendering on team pages, all players should now be correct for you.

Everything apparently returned to normal around 4:00 a.m., but that might have been too late for some of the 20% of fantasy users who choose Yahoo! for their league hosting duties. Fox Business posted an article yesterday positing that Yahoo! might have just knocked a couple million dollars off their advertising bottom-line by pissing off throngs of people who had their drafts ruined by an unidentified glitch.

“In tech, flawless execution is expected,” adds Lowenthal. “If you want to behave like a platform, behave like a platform. If you want to be indispensable, be indispensable.”

With the industry projected to grow at an annual rate of 7.3% between 2014 and 2019, that could be millions of dollars in lost revenue and potential users, for Yahoo.

Based on some of the verbiage used by scorned drafters, a sizeable chunk of Yahoo!’s base might have already defected to ESPN, CBS, or even analog live drafting. Like, with boards and stuff. Check out the official reddit thread of complainy Yahoo! fantasy users for a complete picture of just how hard the shit hit the fan on Sunday.